Health

“Everything You Know Is Wrong” is the prospective title of a book I’ve long wanted to write about why the conventional wisdom about everything almost invariably turns out to be wrong. We’re seen it with all manner of diet advice, such as salt, low-fat fads, and so forth. (Turns out there are already a couple of books with this title and similar themes, so I’m late to the party I »

Holy RuPaul, Batman! Did you know that smoking is bad for you! The U.S. government must be satisfied that it has reached every teen in America with the message that smoking is a drag, but what about people who dress in drag? How could we have forgotten them? More about the whole ad campaign from Breitbart. »

Chris Christie is taking plenty of heat today, and not primarily because he turned up at an Arsenal match wearing a Gunners scarf. The heat, which I consider undeserved, arises from a comment the New Jersey governor made about vaccinating children. Christie was asked to comment about the connection between the measles outbreak and decisions by parents not to vaccinate their children against the sickness. He responded that he and »

Is there a vaccine for liberalism? I guess not. Maybe Big Pharma ought to get to work on one—or at least announce a research program for a cure for liberalism. Think of the comedy gold you’d get from the Left. Not so funny is the growing anti-vax movement, which is mostly on the Left but finds a few adherents on the conspiratorial Right as well. (Maybe Big Pharma could disseminate »

The theme of government bureaucrats as zombies is as old as vampires at least, but sometimes they go out of their way to ratify its inner truth. The CDC “Zombie Pandemic” preparedness manual pictured here is not a parody pic for Power Line’s “Week in Pictures”—it’s real publication the CDC put out a couple years ago. (Here’s the web link for the CDC’s zombie preparedness project—screen shot below.) Remember this »

Nina Pham, the Dallas nurse who was infected with the Ebola virus, is in good condition and improving, according to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. Pham has been transferred to the NIH hospital here in Maryland for reasons of “staffing.” Dozens of employees at the Dallas hospital are treating only Pham, and this is jeopardizing the ability to care for other patients. NIH described Pham’s condition in less favorable terms. She »

Yuval Levin has a sensible article on NRO called “Lessons of the Ebola Crisis.” Levin believes that the Obama administration is basically right when it says we are not witnessing an outbreak of Ebola in the U.S. and that such an outbreak is unlikely in our highly developed public-health system. However, he also believes that critics are right to say we have witnessed serious failures in the response to the »

The federal government, like almost any large institution, will nearly always be wrong-footed when confronted by the unexpected, especially if it’s an emergency. The feds will be slow off the mark and too many of their initial decisions will be wrong. We saw this with Hurricane Katrina and we’re seeing it now with Ebola. Conservatives, of all people, shouldn’t be surprised. If the federal government were capable of performing well »

My friend Craig Harrison recently traveled in Southern Africa, where he found the Ebola “protocols” superior to those of the United States. Today, the Los Angeles Times’ editors published the following letter from Craig: To the editor: I spent most of September in Southern Africa and, unlike the United States, the three nations I visited are taking the threat of Ebola seriously. All arriving passengers in Johannesburg are scanned by »

I don’t think we have written about the spread of Ebola in West Africa, and I confess that I haven’t even thought much about this tragedy, other than to find it odd that President Obama is sending in troops to help deal with the matter. Fortunately, our friend Tevi Troy (along with Scott Gottlieb) has written an excellent piece for the Wall Street Journal about the inadequacy of the response »